Dear Kelfala,
I find it very difficult to accept your proposition that the most pressing problem is that of security.How you could separate the issue of security from control of resources of state, which in turn determines who gets what and how, misses the crucial dynamics of, what a friend recently labelled, la question Sierra Leonais. Such a perspective fails to capture the fundamental rupture in state politics and access to resources that was created under APC.
How, for example, do you come out with a modus vivendi in the present circumstances with the sole demand being the democratization of society at the local level? How do you democractize at the local level and leave the core of state power intact? What I'm getting at is that we need to approach the issue from the perspective of a total overhauling of the system: you cannot do one and leave the other.
Your ideas about reforming the rather archaic feudal institutions need some serious rethinking.It is not a new idea, nor is it as radical as some have suggested.Just recently, Basil Davidson, a leading "friend " of Africa,posed the question in not too dissimilar terms:experimemt with the feudal institutions of pre-colonial Africa. For me the question is not one of reforming these institutions, the issue is to democratize /popularise them so that the idea of the supreme Paramount Chief ceases to have any meaningful political role. Whether they've "functioned better in most respects than national institutions" (binary opposition?) is irrelevant. The history of colonial enlightenment in Sierra Leone is littered with numerous examples of the excesses of these institutions. The post-colonial balance sheet is not too encouraging.To say that these chiefs are elected by the people makes me wonder why they do what they do when they get "elected".Is it not correct to say that they are selected by the governing party--the colonial state, the SLPP,and the APC-- through district councillors and other local notables? For reforms to be meaningful, Kelfala, we need to institutionalized a system of popular elections involving all adult memebers of the respective areas.This would be a good starting point.
And we do not need "reform so that local authorities(would) have the means to defend their people against future Foday Sankoh".What we need to do, and this the challenge for those of us who still believe that ideas have a role to play in the transformation of our society, is to devise an arrangement/ framework that makes it impossible for future Foday Sankoh's to emerge.Such a system should be inclusionary, not exclusionary;competitive, not restrictive,and so on.
Let us dont forget that it was the exclusionary politics of the APC which created the objective conditions for the RUF to emerge.If we allow the present regime to reproduce those very conditions we would have nobody to blame but ourselves.Let us keep playing with ideas.
Ibrahim